Category: Griffin Theatre Company

DOGGED, by Andrea James and Catherine Ryan, directed by Declan Greene, is a new Australian play. It is set in the 1840’s during the colonisation with sheep farmers in the electorate that became McMillan, up in the Alpine district that we know today as Monash, but is Gunaikurnai land. DOGGED is an Australian Gothic tale of a white farm daughter (Blazey Best) with her dog (Anthony Yangoyan) scrambling in the primitive bush for a living and engaging with a Mother Dingo (Sandy Greenwood), in search of her “little ones”, her lost pups. It is a bleak unforgiving land realised in…

IS THERE SOMETHING WRONG WITH THAT LADY? is a single person, 90 minute  monologue. Debra Oswald an Australian writer of ‘plays’ for the Theatre, Television, Film and Radio. She is also a Novelist. Born in 1959. In a funny and excruciatingly honest one-woman show, Debra tells stories about her neurotic childhood, clumsy romantic history, and the anxieties and joys of the writer’s life – all in the hope that the audience can help her work out that ever-important question: what comes next? … (from the publicity blurb). This elder Australian writer appears on stage in a simple costume of warm…

FAMILY VALUES, David Williamson tells us it is his second-last play. CRUNCH TIME, soon to premiere at the Ensemble Theatre will be his last. After 50 years of writing for the theatre, its time to put up the pen, type writer, computer keyboard, or what ever. The Stables Theatre was where we saw THE REMOVALISTS way back in 1971, so it is fitting that the Stables Theatre, then the Nimrod Theatre, hosts this play. On the eve of Roger’s 70th Birthday, dutiful wife, Sue, has organised a family get together with balloons and funny hats to mark the occasion and…

Rita Kalnejais is an Australian actor/writer (BABYTEETH), who now lives in London. FIRST LOVE IS THE REVOLUTION was written 5 years ago and had its premiere at the Soho Theatre, London. It originated, Ms Kalnejais writes in the program notes, when she was in a state of ‘culture shock’, encountering an English language that was so different from her natural Australian English, and in an amorous state with the foxes roaming the streets and backyards of the suburbs of London. Basti (Bardiya McKinnon) is a young adolescent, surviving a family of violent father, Simon (Matthew Whittet), and mentally ill mother,…

This is a revival production of SPLINTER, by Australian writer, Hilary Bell. It was first produced by The Sydney Theatre Company (STC), in 2012. Man (Simon Gleeson) and Woman (Lucy Bell), husband and wife, have just had their daughter Laura returned to them. She had been absent for nine months. No-one knows where she has been or what has happened. The play begins in a mood of wonder and excitement. Also, disbelief. Are they laughing or crying? Is it a dream? Is it real? Laura has not spoken. She is an enigma. In the original production at the STC Laura,…

CITY OF GOLD, is a new Australian play written by actor, Meyne Wyatt – his first play. And what a debut play it is! Writing a play was a plan that Meyne Wyatt had thought would happen in the future when he felt more established as an artist. He was not yet ready. Then, a ‘perfect storm’ of personal events caught him off-guard and accumulated into an overwhelming state of depression that conjured a responding energy, driven by a ‘rage’, that forced him to sit down and write. Writes Meyne in the program notes: So, I did what many first-time…